“... parish of Mountnessing in Essex in 1575, Archer grew up in a time of intense religious unease, as Elizabeth I and her ministers strove to define Protestant orthodoxy and impose it on the English people. Far from unifying the nation, the 1558 Act of Uniformity hardened divisions between Catholic diehards and Calvinist reformers, who themselves split into ...”

“... Elizabeth Hardwick​ was wary of biographers. She called life-writing ‘a scrofulous cottage industry’, a ‘consistent fiction’ masquerading as truth. Its practitioners were necrophiliacs ‘quick in pursuit of the dead’. In her book on Herman Melville, she wrote of the ‘violent exuberance’ that accompanied his rediscovery by critics in the 1920s: ‘He was unearthed … the whole skeleton, as it were, put under the floodlights, a penetrating radar giving the bones a voluptuous rebirth ...”

“... but shuffling a few steps further on was enough to revive their interest): Harold is crowned king of England just before the halfway mark; William lands in Sussex two-thirds of the way through (‘But I want the English to win!’ my five-year-old son wailed); and there’s no hanging about after ‘harold rex interfectus est.’ The English turn and ...”

“... enclosure, the plague, the poor law and the Essex Rebellion. The play concludes with the future Elizabeth I’s christening, during which her godfather, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, is inspired to prophesy:In her days every man shall eat in safety,Under his own vine, what he plants; and singThe merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:God ...”

“... vision of upholstered modern life, as well as the tastes of its royal owners, Queen Mary and King George V. There was a working toilet made by John Bolding and Sons, and a gun room stocked with Purdey shotguns powerful enough to shoot flies. Artists created hundreds of paintings and books for its clubby, masculine library. Harold Nicolson gamely ...”

“... was named; for decades the company exercised quasi-sovereignty there on behalf of the Crown. When Elizabeth II visited its former territories in Manitoba, the HBC governor presented her with the gift its charter mandated for visiting sovereigns: two live beavers, which promptly copulated in front of her.The HBC resembled its prey in being an ...”

“... constantly to flatten himself into a cartoon. We come to understand why Keats was fond of him and Elizabeth Barrett admired him, as well as the reasons his son despised him and his painting failed. Even so, Haydon is not the hero, or even quite the centre of the book. A Sultry Month is a demonstration of how martyrdom takes place in a corner. We see exactly ...”

“... On Valentine’s Day​ 1661 Elizabeth Pepys and her husband, Sam, rose early and walked from their house behind the Tower of London down Seething Lane. They were to visit one of Sam’s superiors, William Batten, surveyor of the navy. The custom was that women should take the first man they saw as their Valentine, so long as he was no relation ...”

“... On​ Christmas Day 1788, the king hid his bedclothes under the bed, put a pillowcase on his head and hugged the pillow, which he called Prince Octavius and said had just been born (Prince Octavius had died five years earlier at the age of four). When George realised what day it was and that he had been kept in his straitjacket and not allowed to go to church, he suddenly went under the sofa, saying that he would converse with his saviour there, and that no one was to interrupt them ...”

“... were hundreds of similar stories. Strangways was himself a victim. The man who proclaimed the king’s return to the town had been captured at the castle in 1645, imprisoned in the Tower of London and heavily fined. By 1660 he was in his mid-seventies and the years and defeats had taken their toll. When it was time to read the proclamation, his voice was ...”

“... the kingdom of the Franks since Charlemagne’s father, Pippin III, deposed the last Merovingian king in 751. The lands the Capetian kings controlled would eventually expand far beyond the family territory of the Île-de-France, to embrace the principalities and smaller counties that would eventually become France. The publisher’s blurb for House of Lilies ...”

“... in 1904, his daughter Virginia lay in bed, listening to the birds singing in Greek and imagining King Edward lurking naked in the azaleas, shouting obscenities; that same summer she apparently attempted to kill herself by leaping out of the window. ‘I have never spent such a wretched 8 months in my life,’ she wrote to a friend when the crisis had ...”

“... more admired by his people than the Prince of Wales, and now Caroline was a success with both the king and the newspapers. Her husband could not bear it. When she addressed the crowd from a window he came and closed it, explaining that she was tired. He removed the furniture from her dining-room so that she could not entertain. The rest of the court, ably led ...”

“... Other interesting facts: Liechtenstein is now the only absolute monarchy in Europe, after its king decided he was bored with the old constitution and wanted his princely liberties back. At least Hans-Adam II actually lives in the country, unlike the co-princes of Andorra (Nicolas Sarkozy and a Catalan bishop, since you ask). I sometimes wonder if the ...”

“... I’s personal rule in 1640, when financial collapse and military defeat by the Scots drove the king to call the Parliament that would destroy him, and the year of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 (though whereas Trevor-Roper’s narrative went beyond the beginning of the war in August, Adamson’s halts with the ...”